BrAndrsn.com

Hi Brian,

Thanks for sharing about your experience with Maxymiser, it was an interesting read.

This may be a daft question, but considering the relative lack of ‘input’ from Maxymiser, if you could go back in time, would you consider using Google Optimiser instead? Or maybe even going forward?

I think it’s interesting that you mention using consultants to help you with such features like, which buttons and calls to action perform best and so on. Working in content, this was the information I was always looking for, but eventually I found that it will be different for every site. Your audience and my audience is likely to be different – mine could be scared of ‘BUY NOW’, but yours could be all over it.

Maybe you never needed a consultant at all, just a decent, free tool and lots of ideas. Good luck with testing in future!

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks for stopping by.

I’m a bootstrapper at heart and I thought long and hard about using Google Website Optimiser – I even bought a few books on the topic. Normally, I’d always choose to do something myself if it could be done by one individual (note – this might be the scrooge-like Scotsman coming out in my personality! I won’t pay for something I can do for myself.) But as we initially planned for our conversion optimisation program to be rolled out across our other sites in the UK and in Spain, Italy and Poland, I felt that it was not something I could take on given my workload at the time. Looking back now however, if I could have delegated some of my tasks to a colleague and taken a month or so out to swot up on the topic, this would be an option I’d be willing to try.

“I think it’s interesting that you mention using consultants to help you with such features like, which buttons and calls to action perform best and so on. Working in content, this was the information I was always looking for, but eventually I found that it will be different for every site. Your audience and my audience is likely to be different – mine could be scared of ‘BUY NOW’, but yours could be all over it.”

I completely agree; what works for one website might not work for another. But when we were sold the Maxymiser services, we were alerted to the fact that they already worked with some of the major players in our space, and these guys had seen success using the Maxymiser process. Rightly or wrongly, I think perhaps we expected more of a “we’re already been there with XYZ, we think this solution would work well with you too” approach. As we didn’t have any preconceived ideas, what had worked for our competitors might have been a good place to start.

Brian

I see this a lot – Clients want to implement tried and true best practices, sales guys leverage this and in reality technical people, like myself, realise that needs of sites differ even within industries.

I don’t want to say you’re incorrect but from my experience, it’s a poor time to start testing before designing a new site. One of my clients took us on to help us with the redesign, but she decided to wait a little and get her new site up before we started testing and she’s much happier for doing so. It basically means, for her, that whatever we improve on her website will last much longer than if we tested on her old site and made the ASSUMPTION that whatever we tested on her old site would automatically work on her new site.

This happens far too much when clients are after conversion optimisation. Sales guys really capitalize on this because this is when clients are most concerned about their conversion rates. Best to do your market research (talking to consumers and reviewing competitors’ sites) to build a solid website and then employ consultants to fine tune it and test things you’re divided on.

By the way, Google Website Optimiser is a great tool, but it’s very rigid. It’s our tool of choice because we understand it and rather than clients paying a hefty platform fee, our budget is focussed on delivering value. If you choose this path, it may be economical for you to hire a Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant to help you setup and run the tests.

Hello Rob, thanks for commenting.

I agree with most of your points, especially your last point. I’ve learned now that I’d rather have a qualified consultant and a free tool, than an expensive tool with no real ‘human’ insight behind it. I guess it’s the same logic that Avinash Kaushik uses when he states that only 10% of an analytics budget should be used on technology. The rest should be spent on getting quality people onboard to advise on what that data means for the business and how to leverage it for business results.

On your first point, I’d like to apologise if my post wasn’t clear in this area. We did not start MV testing on our old site. Maxymiser deserve a thumbs up here for advising us to only start the testing process once our new designs were live, that way would could use all of our ‘learnings’ to see a benefit straight away. So while we were working with Maxymiser before our sites were redesigned, this was purely on a consultancy basis. They did not start multivariate testing until our new site was live.

Hi Brian,

From a UX / usability consultant’s perspective this is an interesting post and comments. Agree completely over people being more important than the technology you use.

It would be good to hear a Maxymiser response. Also I wondered if you should be clear in the intro why you didn’t get a return from Maxymiser – it currently reads as a negative review! (I have no affiliation!)

Cheers
s

Interesting read. I think it will become more and more important for the larger players like Maxymiser to provide value in their consulting.

In time larger companies will start to move back towards the lower cost of free MVT tools in favour of diverting the budget towards in house analysts or consultants to make better use of the results. In the same way as is happening with Google Analytics.

Brian – What you really should have done was commence testing BEFORE you made any permanent changes to your website. Unless the site was severely outdated and there were several major issues, you should have run a series of tests on different elements of the site and fed them into your new site plan. The core purpose of testing is to measure the changes so making major unmeasured changes to your site before starting a series of smaller measured changes might not be the best way to go in the future.

If you are considering a major re-design in the future you should also employ some user input through usability testing or focus groups, again to input into the changes you intend to make BEFORE you make them. They prove very valuable to site re-designs.

Hope that might be useful,
Matt